A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

In this exuberantly praised book - a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner - David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his fiction.

Oblivion: Stories

In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness--a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity.

The Pale King

The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has. The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace's death....

The Broom of the System: A Novel

At the center of The Broom of the System is the betwitching (and also bewildered) heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. The year is 1990 and the place is a slightly altered Cleveland, Ohio, which sits on the edge of a suburban wasteland-the Great Ohio Desert. Lenore works as a switchboard attendant at a publishing firm, and in addition to her mind-numbing job, she has a few other problems. Her great-grandmother, a one-time student of Wittgenstein, has disappeared with twenty-five other inmates of the Shaker Heights Nursing Home.

Girl with Curious Hair: Stories

From the eerily "real", almost holographic evocations of historical figures like Lyndon Johnson and over-televised game-show hosts and late-night comedians to the title story, in which terminal punk nihilism meets Young Republicanism, David Foster Wallace renders the incredible comprehensible, the bizarre normal, the absurd hilarious, and the familiar strange.

David Foster Wallace: In His Own Words

Collected here for the first time are the stories and speeches of David Foster Wallace as read by the author himself. Over the course of his career, David Foster Wallace recorded a variety of his work in diverse circumstances - from studio recordings to live performances - that are finally compiled in this unique collection.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In his exuberantly acclaimed collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, he combines hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.

Signifying Rappers

Finally back in print - David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's exuberant exploration of rap music and culture. Living together in Cambridge in 1989, David Foster Wallace and longtime friend Mark Costello discovered that they shared "an uncomfortable, somewhat furtive, and distinctively white enthusiasm for a certain music called rap/hip-hop." The book they wrote together, set against the legendary Boston music scene, mapped the bipolarities of rap and pop, rebellion and acceptance, glitz and gangsterdom.

The David Foster Wallace Reader

Where do you begin with a writer as original and brilliant as David Foster Wallace? Here - with a carefully considered selection of his extraordinary body of work, chosen by a range of great writers, critics, and those who worked with him most closely. This volume presents his most dazzling, funniest, and most heartbreaking work.

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace was the leading literary light of his generation, a man who not only captivated readers with his prose but also mesmerized them with his brilliant mind. In this, the first biography of the writer, D. T. Max sets out to chart Wallace’s tormented, anguished, and often triumphant battle to succeed as a novelist as he fights off depression and addiction to emerge with his masterpiece, Infinite Jest.

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

In David Lipsky's view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace's pieces for Harper's magazine in the '90s were, according to Lipsky, like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.

Underworld

Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.

Gravity's Rainbow

Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.

Infinite Jest

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.

Infinite Jest, Part III: The Endnotes

These are the endnotes to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, a gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America. Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives.

White Noise

When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event", a lethal black chemical cloud floats over the Gladneys' lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys - radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings - pulsing with life yet suggesting something ominous.

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

Author of the National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy is one of the most provocative American stylists to emerge in the last century. The striking novel Blood Meridian offers an unflinching narrative of the brutality that accompanied the push west on the 1850s Texas frontier.

The Givenness of Things: Essays

The spirit of our times can appear to be one of joyless urgency. As a culture we have become less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind, and more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield material well-being. But while cultural pessimism is always fashionable, there is still much to give us hope.

Publisher's Summary

Beloved for his epic agony, brilliantly discerning eye, and hilarious and constantly self-questioning tone, David Foster Wallace was heralded by both critics and fans as the voice of a generation. Both Flesh and Not gathers 15 essays never published in book form, including "Federer Both Flesh and Not", considered by many to be his nonfiction masterpiece; "The (As it Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2", which deftly dissects James Cameron's blockbuster; and "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young", an examination of television's effect on a new generation of writers.

A sweeping, exhilarating collection of the author's most emotionally immediate work, Both Flesh and Not spans almost 20 years of Wallace's career and reminds us why A.O. Scott called him "The Best Mind of His Generation" (The New York Times).

I loved and appreciated this book more than the four stars might suggest. I loved the way it was formated. I loved revisiting essays I had read previously in New York TImes, Salon, the Atlantic, BAE 2007. I loved the ability to again be surprised by DFW's wit, charm, inteligence, and in the last couple essays anger. Having recently lost a loved one in a rather dramatic fashion, I was also taken back those ordurous emotions I felt on September 12/13, 2008 when I heard that DFW killed himself. In the middle of this enormous banking/economic collapse, losing DFW (to others) might have seemed small. But almost 4.5 years later my 401(k) has recovered but I have yet to get over DFW killing himself. A tad dramatic? I'm sure. Anyway, back to my review of Both Flesh and Not. Part of what I loved about this series of essays was how the publisher used his definitions and usage notes as paragraph breaks. It was brilliant and insightful and actually VERY intimate.

Both Robert Petkoff and Katherine Kellgren^1 did a fantastic job with narration.

1. It does make me wonder how Katherine will put this on her resume. Does she say she was a narrator for Both Flesh and Not or a footnote narrator? Anyway, the narration worked well and showed how Hachette could have addressed the narration debacle that was Infinite Jest.

This is the first posthumous collection of David Foster Wallace's nonfiction work. It is hard to say whether or not the pieces here are of any value to non-fans of Wallace, but as someone who thoroughly enjoys both his fiction and non-fiction alike, this is a collection most definitely worth the read. The collected pieces were all previously published elsewhere, so there is nothing here that has never been seen before.

The titular piece on Federer is a great one and has been referred to by many as a masterpiece. Tennis has always been a major writing point of Wallace's with the subject featuring prominently in Infinite Jest as well as pieces focusing on the sport in "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley" in the Supposedly Fun Thing... collection and a review of Tracy Austin's autobiography in Consider the Lobster. As a gifted writer, powerful observer and tennis aficionado (he tinkered around in the junior rankings as a teenager), Wallace make's the sport of tennis, oft not considered a major one in here in the U.S., come to life; adding beauty and grace in a manner that transfers his enthusiasm and understanding to his audience with ease.

Fictive futures may very well seem dated at first glance as it discusses authors and a sense of things from the point of view of 1987 when it was written, but carries with many universal and still true points. Wallace discusses creative writing programs, teachers, students, the role of pop culture and the roll of how said culture and entertainment is delivered. He discusses film and television and fitting true to his nature, poses insightful questions and perceptions about where the culture is and where it is going in various respects made all the more interesting by the fact that it is now a quarter century later and we now have the benefit of hindsight and comparison.

Without doing a piece by piece review, I will simply say that this is a very approachable collection with familiar and understandable topics. I will not say that is collection is easy however, as the thing I enjoy most about Wallace's subjects and style is the challenge of his writing and the topics he writes about. They are often things I would not investigate on my own, but items none the less that are much appreciated and enjoyed through David Foster Wallace's looking glass.Highly Recommended!!

They pad out this book with some pedestrian definitions from DFW's notebook at the beginning of each essay. With the lame table of contents you cant find where each essay is and you have to listen to interminable reading of definitions to get to the next essay

I wouldn't necessarily have left all of the essays included in the book. It's piecemeal of his material for various magazines over the year and, while insightful and certainly entertaining at spots, it's overall just *ok* and I certainly don't believe Wallace would have chosen these specific essays for a collection of his material (for the most part these essays were available for him to have chosen from previously and he clearly opted not to do so).

David Foster Wallace is my favorite writer. But in this recording, the producers decided to pad it with vocabulary. This is done by having the female narrator read words that were in Wallace's notebook, along with their definitions from the dictionary (not ever Wallace's own definitions). And these vocabulary sections precede each actual essay by Wallace, so there is no easy way to skip them. And finally, the voice of the female reader is annoying in the extreme--completely unlike the voice of Wallace himself, which you can hear (and I strongly recommend that you hear) in his collection "Consider the Lobster." What a shame that the producers felt this padding was necessary.

Would you try another book from David Foster Wallace and/or Robert Petkoff and Katherine Kellgren ?

No

How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?

Not sure about that.

Which scene was your favorite?

N/A

Do you think Both Flesh and Not needs a follow-up book? Why or why not?

Not for me.

Any additional comments?

So I listened to this because I had heard about DFW and wanted to see what he was like. I understand he is very popular and well respected so maybe I am just missing something. He gets really obsessive about stuff that I just don't find that interesting, maybe it is just my personality but I found my mind wondering. He is obviously very smart and it is brilliantly written but the topics bored me. Highly recommended if you love literary analysis and tennis, emphasis on the tennis.